EDITORIAL: Please don’t let peace be just a word

Annie Lennox is fabulous, of course, but it's as poignant as it is stirring; and it makes a lot of sense.

The fact is: Peace is just a word. And that is a truth which is especially resonant today: waking up, Monday morning, with a very different kind of weekend hangover.

Paris: It was almost like 9/11 all over again.

Only this time, it wasn't an attack on symbols of western capitalism, freedom and apparent domination.

This, instead, was a direct attack on the everyday; on happiness.

It was an attack on everyday people, going about their everyday lives and enjoying those snatches of everyday happiness we all take for granted.

ISIS has made this war personal; not that it wasn't already with so many lives lost to date.

But this was targeting our way of life.

If there can be something good come of this, it's that we mustn't ever take for granted those moments of happiness.

Furthermore, we need to be grateful, every day, that we live in a country that has carved happiness, tolerance and peace into its psyche.

The event itself wasn't gut-wrenching enough.

Seeing it unfold, and then - as any parents will know all too well - came the challenge of having to convey these awful events to their children, explaining them in a way that was sensitive but also truthful and appropriately real. But then came the social media.

There were the inevitable hasthtags and such, there were some beautiful gestures, changed profile pictures and the sharing of stories and messages of hope.

There were calls to arms, pleas to fight, promises to reap revenge.

And then, most disturbingly, there was the broad-brush anti-Muslim sentiment, calls for people not to pray because it was religion that started all this in the first place, and a knee-jerk hate-fest in some quarters against refugees who are fleeing exactly this kind of attack and persecution.

As a community we need to continue to protect those values we hold true: our freedom, our right to believe and worship, our right to free speech. But enjoying the privilege of any of the above comes with a responsibility.

Without temperance; without due thought and without tolerance (not blind and all trusting, but certainly the kind which lends to our natural sense of compassion) then, as the song goes, peace really is just a word.

Hollow. Bereft of meaning or reason.

We all have a very important responsibility in our community - and what's more, to those therein.

It's to all work to preserve, and assure the meaning of, that very important word.